We hired a new writer! With a phd!
We just hired a writer! She’s not just any writer; she has a Doctorate in English! Writing content for your site is one of the most important things you could do.
It is what search engines like Google look at. If they come to your site and see lots of informative writing with good keywords then they will deem it a useful site and will rank it highly.
It’s all about keywords, so for example if you have lots of nice writing with keywords about organic food (keywords such as: organic, food, green, produce, pesticide-free etc) then the search engine will decide it is a useful site for that topic.
Next time a person does a search for any of those keywords the search engine will put your site high in the list. And thus more people will come to your site. If you are selling something then you have more customers. Makes sense?
Thus the importance of nicely written content on your site. Thus our hiring a fantastic writer.
I have a degree in creative writing from Columbia University so I’m no lightweight in journalism or writing. And I know that it is perfectly possible for an accomplished writer to write a very informative article about something they know nothing about.
In fact, when I was in college I often got A’s for writing essays on topics I knew nothing aboutJ. Back then I called it bullshitting because I was meant to know about my topic. They had assigned many books for us to read. But I learned that if you were a good writer nobody could tell that you weren’t an expert in the field.
Journalists do it all the time. They are given an assignment and a deadline. They don’t have time to learn the whole subject. They become very good at getting the jargon and overall feel. They paraphrase other people’s thoughts, and presto! they have a great article.
Some may find this unethical but I strongly believe that we live in a postmodern information age where the collective awareness is all around us and anyone is free to assimilate the information as they wish.
That was a big sentence! Am I speaking fancy to justify plagiarism? I’ll have to think about that for a while. What I think mean is it has all been said before and we are all just rehashing it so lets not get too uptight about who owns what.
Granted some may feel I’m giving an ok to plagiarizing other peoples’ work. Not so. What I’m saying is firstly that most information is now public domain, at least if you look hard enough you will find a variation of it that is not copyrighted. For example one of the first things she had to write was an article on Wicca, the religion of being a witch. There is so much info in the public domain that it was easy to write an essay and not commit any unethical act at all.
And secondly, if it isn’t public domain, you can read ten peoples’ articles and then write an article in your own words based on a synthesis of the other ten. To do this takes brains and people do it all the time.
Thirdly, and probably most ethically, you can write your article and give people credit if you use their ideas. If the person is great then some of their light will brush off on you and everyone benefits.
I actually find this third one hardest to do because of what I mentioned before - we live in a postmodern information world where every thought comes from a multitude of places and people and for one person to claim right to it seems ridiculous.
Along the same lines I have very little attachment to any of my writing…we’ll see if that changes if I ever write a bestselling book…again I see my ethics treading another fine line.
As I write this I feel I’m writing myself into a corner. OK, so I hired a writer to write about things that she may not be an expert in. Ok, I also hired her to read up on what has been written before and then write it again in her own words, hopefully with new insights and better written.
Am I treading a fine line here between plagiarism and original content? Hmm… maybe. I’ll have to think about this one some more….
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